Arsenal or Man City may be the 2025/26 Premier League Champions – but they aren’t the healthiest brands in top-flight football

The 2025/26 Premier League campaign is drawing to a close, and once more, the title race is a battle between Pep Guardiola and his onetime protégé Mikel Arteta. But while these clubs duke it out for the top spot, data from YouGov FootballIndex UK shows that Liverpool – currently fifth in the league after claiming the trophy last year – remain the club in English football with the highest brand health. Index scores, a measure of brand health that average several metrics, are at 30.3. This represents a 5-point drop compared to Q4 2025, but it is not enough to dethrone the Reds. The Gunners are hot on their heels, with a score of 29.4 (and an improvement of +0.8 points), while Manchester City’s decline of -0.7 leaves them further away in third place (24.6).

But, as is often the case with the Premier League itself, the more interesting stories can be found further down the table. On the positive side, Aston Villa – in contention for a Champion’s League spot – have seen their scores jump by 6.5 points: the largest increase of any club in our table. A resurgent Manchester United have seen nearly as great a rise after enduring their worst Premier League campaign ever last season, and after parting with manager Ruben Amorim in January 2026: scores went from 4.0 to 10.4, a jump of 6.4 points.

On the less positive side, Tottenham Hotspur are rock-bottom of our brand health table, with a score of -6.8: plummeting -14.6 points from the Q4 2025 score of 7.6.  The North London team is currently facing a relegation battle in a season that has seen a high level of managerial turnover (the team’s current head coach, Roberto de Zerbi, is their fourth within the last calendar year).

Can Spurs recover under new leadership? Can Arsenal dethrone Liverpool as league champions, and as the UK’s healthiest brand? The answers to these questions, among other things, will come next quarter – although the data may well raise more questions in turn.

This article originally appeared in City A.M.